This invention relates to methods and apparatus for management of remote access equipment in a telecommunications network.
Existing telecommunications equipment may require network connectivity for data transfer such as control, status and configuration information, but may have no external interfaces except for the TDM voice circuits to which they are connected. A Remote Digital Terminal (RDT) is one such example of this kind of equipment. The RDT, commonly called “remote access equipment”, terminates subscriber lines and communicates via an industry standard GR-303 interface to an Integrated Digital Terminal (IDT) switching system (a class 5 switch).
An Embedded Operations Channel (EOC) is provided in the GR-303 standard to add, modify, and delete subscriber lines and to provide some basic level of maintenance activity to an operator. This EOC however, does not necessarily provide an industry standard interface for all possible maintenance activity for a given RDT, primarily due to vendor specific hardware architectures.
Thus on most newer systems, an additional local management interface is provided on the RDT for specialised or vendor specific maintenance functions. This is typically accessed using a proprietary user interface via a shell-based Command Line Interface, either through a serial port or from a Telnet interface over an Ethernet port. Neither the serial port nor the Ethernet port is accessible when an RDT is deployed remotely, since these connection protocols are only designed to operate over relatively short distances. Thus any vendor specific maintenance interfaces are made unavailable to a remote operator when an RDT is installed remotely without some other form of communication channel in addition to the GR-303 link. This is termed a “dark” office, in which no serial port or internet connection is available. In such deployments, the only possible connectivity is via a T1 facility, using a DS0 attached to a High Level Data Link Control (HDLC) framer for digital communications. This requirement adds complexity and cost to remote installations since either extra hardware must be installed to provide full remote operation, or personnel must visit the RDT site periodically to use the local management interface. Also, if the legacy IDT associated with a given RDT is replaced with next generation equipment, this proprietary interface may become unavailable.
An object of the invention is to provide a mechanism to create network connections between an IDT and an RDT, without modifying the next generation equipment.